Disagree

I read Krugman's article, and it didn't ring true to me at all.

First, I think there's a huge difference between Hillary and Bernie, one that is obscured rather than illuminatedby the corporate media debates and election coverage.

Second, it's very easy to forget about the huge percentage of disaffected voters who have lost faith in either party. They call themselves independents, for the most part because the politicians of both parties are perceived (accurately IMHO) as being owned by their large campaign donors, giving us lip service and giving the donors room service.

The point I'm trying to make is that Bernie is someone these people relate to, and for the right reasons.

So he has the capability to drive a huge turnout, with people showing up who have given up on the process. And there are a LOT of such people.

Not only would that help him win, it would help elect a Democratic House and Senate.

I don't know when or even if we could turn them our way (I'd say the Senate would be likely in 2016, maybe 2018 for the House). Hopefully the party would follow Bernie's lead and stand up for our interests, getting the public to come out to the polls to vote the obstructing Republicans out of office so the policies, which polls clearly show they want, can be enacted.

People are starving for authentic representation by someone who is working for them rather than for their large corporate donors, and we shouldn't underestimate the potential of that.

Sure, but at that point, what leverage do we have?

We'll just be f'in retards again who have nowhere else to go, and should be grateful to not have a Republican in the White House.

That movie is tired, got tired of it over 20 years ago.

Now we have extreme cliimate change, a ticking clock on our future. No sign from the establishment Democrats that they are up to the challenge, or even all that interested in it, since their donors aren't.

And they certainly won't be pushed into serious action about corporate campaign money, they're addicted to it and it's the only way they know to get elected.

I agree that if she wins we have to be more determined than ever to push back on the triangulation and the corporatism that will follow, but she hasn't won yet, let's not construct a fantasy of holding her accountable, because we know how that goes.

Wow, great post!

Thanks, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's not easy to do it, and we lose some friends along the way, especially in this society, which rewards people who selectively ignore inconvenient truth.

My philosophy is that if we can do it without alienating or insulting people, even in disagreement seeds are planted that may later take root. Maybe your friends will someday see something a little differently because of your efforts.

I haven't read that particular book. I used to spend a lot of time reading such things, not so much anymore, lost in the internet nowadaze (a good Octafish OP can derail my schedule for a long time). There's a lot of great info online.

The book I cut my teeth on was a book called The Secret Team (The CIA and its Allies In Control Of The United States and the World) by L. Fletcher Prouty, others too of course. I don't particularly recommend that book, I don't completely trust the author, but it was my introduction into a lot of what goes on, from which I did my own follow-up reading.

I used to support, in my own small way, Daniel Sheehan's Christic Institute efforts to get to the bottom of CIA (and related assets) activities in central America, a little before Iran-Contra was coming to light. Most of the same players Sheehan was researching (he was officially prosecuting a case where he thought the CIA had blown up a reporter, which was his way to do discovery on the whole lot of them. His case turned out to be false, the CIA had not actually done that particular deed, but his research was invaluable for ferreting out what our nation was up to down there), anyway as I was saying most of those players turned up later in the investigation of Iran-Contra. Sheehan also used the phrase Secret Team, not that it matters what the label is really.

Feel free to let me know if you like the book on Dulles.

I think if people were better informed of our less-publicized history, they would understand that a lot of what is advertised to us as terrorism or evil-doing is actually blow-back from our government's interventions into their lives.

Thread win

Bernie stayed on what he sees as important to the American people, after respectfully expressing sympathy for the French.

This is the game the MSM and establishment MIC-funded politicians always plays. Hijack any attempt to address why it is that we, supposedly the richest nation on earth, can't afford to support our people the way countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Canada, and much of Europe manage to do.

It's because the MIC has got us all by the balls, paying for the corporate resource extraction protection militia from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers, while the only reason we're under any threat whatsoever is because of blowback from our troops being used for that exact purpose.

I for one am glad there is a candidate who understands this and does not allow himself to be drawn into the neocon agenda.

Yes, I've seen that sentiment raging around here

I think many people are just not all that evolved in their thinking, and their views are reactive and derivative, put in place by the MSM zeitgeist.

I may well be a dreamer, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. Sometimes, when you're been walking the wrong path for a long time, you need to re-evaluate what got you into a situation, rather than doubling down. I've been dealing with this in my own life. I think that's where we are as a nation and as a society. Usually there are external signs that such change is needed.

The fires of hate need fuel and oxygen to burn. The fuel is of course the hatred that emerges from other acts of violence and oppression, and the interests of those who profit from war and from the resource extraction industries. The oxygen is all of the attention and hair-on-fire focus given to the latest outrage.

This fire serves the interests of many, from the MIC to the MSM to the politicians they support, and on the other side the extremists who would love to blow our whole system to pieces. And I have to say they have some very valid reasons for that sentiment, which is why I work so hard for us to reform it through the political process. It must change, one way or another.

It's in the interests of the average person, most all of us, to withdraw from the whole war mentality.

We have to radically retool our energy approach anyway because of climate change.

Our troops in their lands will endlessly create more radical terrorists. There is no winning that war, the wars themselves by definition create more enemies.

The ordinary people in those countries are no more our enemy than the ordinary people in our own country. I spent a year as a child in Iran, I have some actual experience with the people there, they're people like us, living in a different context, with the same human needs we have, mostly good-hearted with the usual variance you find in any population.

Before the U.S. was fully captured by corporate interests, we were one of the most loved nations on this earth. Since we've been waging resource wars, and smaller acts of interference (coups, assassination of labor leaders, meddling in elections) in many more nations, all to support corporate interests, we are now hated by literally billions. There is no way to fight our way out of that, it only makes it worse.

Mind our own business when possible, when we have to act, do so as a police action, rather than as a military. Work as hard on restoring positive relations with the people in the middle east as we have worked to secure access to their resources. The vast majority of them don't want endless violence and war, especially not in their lands. And we don't need their resources anymore. With the money we spend on our military, we can retool our energy use to renewables, and we must, because climate change.

Terrorism is, for the most part, the last resort of people who have been completely disempowered in their own lives and nations, and who have no armies to fight for their interests.

We have a serious lack of external perspective in this country. How would it feel to have other countries' troops all over our country? To live in the shadow of drones? To live under governments set up and propped up by a foreign nation?

I can't imagine living in the shadow of drones overhead that can strike out of nowhere at anytime, extinguishing life with massive explosions, killing innocents as well as the people they rightly or wrongly target, where the targeting criteria is entirely in the hands of a foreign power.

If that were happening in our own country, I don't think many of us would see the people resisting it as evil-doers.

Restoring that perspective is the way out of this. In the meantime, some precise anti-terrorist actions will be necessary, but will only help if they are limited to targeting the actual terrorists. Otherwise, we're just adding fuel to the fire.

I think she's a hawk, not a chump

I'm certain she's no chump. It's for you to decide which is worse, being fooled or being aligned with the greater agenda which badly wanted multiple regime changes in the middle east.

If they had gone after the Saudis they could have claimed at least a whiff of moral high ground, that's one regime that is in desperate need of change.

No, they went after Afghanistan (Taliban, so there's that, but mostly just a host country for the terrorist training grounds, whereas the source was Saudi Arabia). They went after Iraq. Their hands were all over the regimes being toppled in Egypt, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, the current mess in Yemen, and they can't wait to "do" Iran.

Hillary dd more than approve the IWR, she and her State Department had their fingers in all of the above.

PNAC anyone?

DLC's PNAC Document - Hillary Clinton On America's Strategy

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251495072

There is a frightening amount of overlap between neocon policies and the DLC/New Dem foreign policies.

Calling Hillary a chump, IMHO, for being duped by the right-wing into supporting the Iraq War, misses the mark. Perhaps you were being kind, and suggested the more innocent of reasons she could have supported it.

I have no doubts about Hillary's intelligence, she is nobody's fool. What we're dealing with here is someone that is a true believer in the U.S. as global police and as the military arm of global corporate resource extraction and a permanent state of warfare and foreign interventions.

I think the public deserves a choice in this matter. We have the Republican Party to push this agenda. The Democratic Party needs to offer an alternative foreign policy, one that respects the sovereignty of other nations, values peace over profits, and that doesn't rob the U.S. Treasury of the funds we need to care for our people from birth to death in a dignified manner.

The question is, are we even allowed a choice in this, or are we so far down the foxhole that only candidates who support the war machine have a chance? Scary question.

Bernie's a large step in the right direction. He'll have limited control over the machine, but he's no war hawk, and can make a difference.

Here you go

Seems a conservative like yourself wouldn't want U.S. taxpayers to pay for it

Why, exactly, are we spending all of this money when the only attacks against our country are blowback against our troops being in everyone's country?

Mexico and Canada have got us surrounded, better have the world's largest military to defend us.

I disagree on principle that we should be projecting our "influence" militarily all over the planet. It's wrong, plain and simple. It's also not our citizens' interests, nor our planet's, that are being furthered by our militarism, it's the interests and profits of the world's largest and most corrupt corporations, who require "stable business environments" to guarantee them extraction rights to natural resources independent of the wishes of the people that live in those countries. That's wrong, plain and simple.

But a conservative analysis (which I personally have no interest in but would think you would) would have to acknowledge that we are literally taking wealth from our children's mouths to pay for most of the planet's military expenditures, running massive budget deficits in the process. That seems entirely unsupportable.

Everyone needs to see this:

Everyone needs to see this:

That is a great statement by Sanders, I agree with it 100%

and thank him for making it.

I very much wanted someone from the left to run against Obama in 2012. Many of the people who voted for Obama in '08 were disappointed with how he governed. He punched down instead of up, and he did it consistently. Not at all what he campaigned as.

The truth is we actually turned in massive numbers in '08 to elect a change candidate, after rejecting the primary candidate we perceived as being more corporatist and hawkish, Hillary. As it turned out, IMO, he governed much the same as Hillary would have governed, business as usual but better than Republicans on issues where it didn't require challenging powerful interests.

I realize not everyone sees it that way, but a lot of us do. Those of us that see it that way were hoping for a primary challenger to reassert our demands for actual change.

I don't have the words to express how thrilled I am to have someone like Sanders standing up for what I believe in. Our party has left people like me without representation for pretty much my entire adult life, though they claim to be all for us at election time, then ignore our issues because the power lies with big money, and that's who they represent.

I would have given up on this party if they had run Hillary without a serious challenge from the left. We'll see how it all plays out, but the way Hillary supporters are attempting to use this well-stated stance by Sanders against him gives me little hope that the party is even worth saving. It certainly isn't if people like the ones making these attacks are the ones running the party.

We have a big business party, it's the Republican party. We need a party that represents the interests of the people who can't write the huge campaign checks. If that isn't us, we have no legitimacy.